Hyderabad: Mapping India’s Health Status

May 9, 2019

In a unique collaboration, Tata Trusts and Hyderabad-based National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) launched a first-of-its-kind centralised data repository that strives to throw light on eating habits, patterns, status of malnutrition, prevalence of non-communicable diseases and many more factors that define the nutrition value chain of the country.

The collaboration through Tata NIN Centre of Excellence in Public Health Nutrition has also gone live online, presenting a rare collection of databases on nutritional habits of India. Essentially, the Centre for Excellence through the repository aims to augment functioning of different central and State government departments by providing data-driven insights and advice.

The repository of data has tried to address and showcase challenging issues such as eating habits of all Indian States, the changing patterns of eating in the country, State-wide intake of micronutrients and geographical distribution of malnutrition in the country. It has also attempted to take on extremely complex issues of food consumption patterns of States that have traditionally produced more food.

The unique aspect of the centralised data repository is the painstaking way in which the data sets in various categories such as crop production, food and nutrient intake, bioavailable nutrients such as iron, status of fortification in India, health outcomes, including anaemia, BMI, blood pressure and diabetes, among others, have been presented on the India map.

The data repository also provides the exact overview of food and nutrition status of individual States as well as the overall status of the country. According to senior officials, Tata NIN Centre for Excellence at the NIN Campus will also create a framework for a national nutrition and health survey. In the long term it would also create a biobank, a bio-repository for storing biological samples.

The authorities from the Tata NIN Centre of Excellence have sourced the data from various government agencies, including National Family Health Survey (NFHS), Agriculture Informatics Division of Government of India and National Sample Survey, to name a few.

The advanced analytics and big data visualisation through a Central Data Repository can be accessed at https://tatanin.org, which has gone live recently. – Telangana Today